Yeah Yeah Yeahs – ‘Fever To Tell’
It was a total boy’s club. Between bands like The Strokes, Interpol, TV on the Radio, and even later additions like Vampire Weekend and LCD Soundsystem, the burgeoning early 2000s indie rock scene in New York City had a lot of testosterone floating around it. To provide a much-needed counterpoint to that, in came Karen Orzolek, who was much closer to David Bowie and Kimya Dawson than Robert Plant or Kurt Cobain. Behind her was a wiry genius guitarist named Nick Zinner and a jazz-trained drummer named Brian Chase. Together, they formed the Yeah Yeah Yeahs.
For their debut LP, the band sought to channel their dynamic live shows into a palatable record. Nevertheless, Fever To Tell remains the band’s most ferocious, impactful, naive, strange, and instantly recognisable record. TV on the Radio producer David Sitek helped smooth out the rougher edges, but Fever To Tell remains remarkably raw.
‘Rich’ doesn’t ease you into things: it catapults you straight into the bizarre world of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Karen O’s voice leaps octaves as she drawls, screams, and sings about taking the power dynamics in a relationship by the balls. Zinner’s guitar lines are metallic, while Chase bashes away like a caveman. It’s punk in its ethos and sound, but there’s something else bubbling just under the surface. Snatches of melody, noise, and chaos lurk around each corner.
The band’s stripped-back set-up requires Zinner to layer his guitar lines, drop octaves, mess with stompbox effects, and even occasionally pick up some keyboards. ‘Date With the Night’ brings all of those into a cacophony of sound. Fever To Tell is the perfect mid-20s album: it’s full of energy and aggression, but can still go out and dance at night while feeling the anxieties of love, money, and one’s direction in life.
The ragged edges are purposefully kept in full view: the staggered count-off in ‘Man’ and Chase’s false start on ‘No No No’ (it’s worth noting that once he gets his marching rhythm going, it’s rhythmically pristine) chief among them. More so than any of their other albums, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs were insistent on showing off their punk bonafide on Fever To Tell. As dance-rock and high production values became too attractive to pass up, the band would gravitate away from the intoxicating fury of Fever To Tell.
Meanwhile, Karen O keeps swiping at the scores of meathead idiots that she encountered in every gig, interview, or moment she stepped out on the street. “Boy you just a stupid bitch / and girl you just a no good dick,” she sings in ‘Black Tongue’, taking the traditional gender roles and giving them a playful switch. Lovers are just warm heaters to stave off the night in ‘Cold Light’. Karen O isn’t lying when she claims that there’s ‘Modern Romance’: there’s no room for it on Fever To Tell.
With one major exception. ‘Maps’ is now and forever the quintessential Yeah Yeah Yeahs song, which is strange because the band never did anything like it ever again. A massive, world-conquering rock track with over love song lyrics and a pop melody, ‘Maps’ forced listeners to reckon with the fact that the Yeah Yeah Yeahs could be the biggest and best band to emerge from the NYC indie underground. With all three members working at their highest levels, ‘Maps’ is an all-time classic that ensured that there would always be space for the Yeah Yeah Yeahs on festival stages, movie soundtracks, and mixtapes.
It seemed pretty obvious that the band weren’t interested in sticking to the raw power of Fever To Tell forever. But their eagerness to move away from their initial sound had a side effect of preserving the first version of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs perfectly in ember for eternity. The band’s other albums have their quirks, but nothing has ever been as immediately legendary as Fever To Tell. It established the legend of Karen O and proved that indie rock was in desperate need of a woman’s perspective, even if it was just as nasty and depraved as the boys. Sometimes, it was even more so.
